The Criminal Page 14
I couldn’t speak or move for a minute; I was that surprised and glad to see him. Then, my voice came out in a yell, “Four Trey! Four Trey Whitey!”
“Please, Tommy”—he winced, tapping his head. “Not so early in the morning.”
I hunkered down in front of him, grinning from ear to ear. “Boy, am I ever tickled to see you!” I said. “Why, I heard you’d been killed.”
“Just shot a few times, Tommy. Just cut up a little. It was the other guy that got killed.”
“You figure on sitting-in here?”
“I have set in here, Tommy. And being reasonably sure that you’d be here, I set you in with me.”
“Hey, that’s great,” I said. “That’s sure good news, Four Trey.”
“So act like it,” he chuckled. “Drink up and smoke up.”
He tossed me the bottle and a part-package of cigarettes. I lit up and took a long thirsty drink, and he took another bottle and another package of cigarettes from his pocket. We drank and smoked, not saying anything for a time. Just grinning and looking at each other, like old friends will when they come together.
“Yes, Tommy,” he said, at last. “The sere and yellow days are gone, and the birds are about to bust their guts with singing. Briefly, the line starts hiring tomorrow, and you and I shall be working on it, and two weeks thence, with the coming of the first payday—guess what we will be doing then, Tommy.”
“Now, how could I ever guess?” I laughed.
He was sitting on a bindle of work clothes, but he wore an expensive suit and shoes and a snowy white shirt—a white one, for Pete’s sake! I was sure he was carrying a big roll, plenty to travel first-class. But he liked it this way, so here he was jungled up with six hundred other boes.
“So you’ve got the stroke on the gambling,” I said, taking a small sip of the booze.
He nodded that he had. “The exclusive stroke, Tommy. It just happened that I knew some of the high-pressure from a drainage job in East Texas—Higby, remember him? So it’s you and me alone from here to the Gulf. You on blackjack and me with the dice. Now, about your cut…”
“Hell,” I said. “I trust you, Four Trey.”
Four Trey said drily that that was nice, but spelling things out was much nicer. “Anyway, we’ll make it the usual. I bank the game, and you cut twenty per cent of the take. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” I said.
Maybe I should tell you that contractors on pipeline jobs liked to have one or two straight gamblers around. Nor did they mind if a couple of women followed the camp, as long as they were clean and didn’t come into the camp-proper. It wasn’t often that a woman did follow it; it just wasn’t practical, you know, roughing it on her own as much as a hundred miles from the nearest town. But there were always gamblers. Pipelining is rough, hard work, seven days a week, and gambling kept the men from getting restless. It also kept them broke enough so that they weren’t always jumping the job.
“What kind of a job are we getting, Four Trey?” I asked, because we would have to live in the camp, naturally, and if you lived in camp you had to work. “Are we down for time-keeping again?”
He shook his head, looking a little unhappy for the first time. “I’m afraid not, Tommy. The banks or whoever it is that’s backing the job are putting in their own timekeepers.”
“Well…you mean we’re going to have to muck it?”
“Oh, no. We’re certainly not going to stoop to mucking. It just wouldn’t be worth it, getting our hands all calloused with those long-handled spoons.”
I said I could muck it, swing a pick and shovel with any man. But I was just as pleased to be doing something else. Four Trey said that I wouldn’t like the job we were going to do.
“But it was the only halfway decent thing open, Tommy. The only job we could possibly hold, and handle our gambling.”
“I don’t care what it is,” I said, “as long as it isn’t powder monkey. I don’t work with dynamite.”
“Dyna’s a good girl, Tommy. You can chew her up and spit her out, and she won’t say a word.”
“You…” I stared at him. “You mean, that’s the job? Powder monkeyin’? You…you…” I choked up. “You think I’m goin’ to powder monkey after what happened to…?”
“A real good girl, Dyna is,” he wheedled. “She wears lousy perfume, and you get by-God hellish headaches from it. But safe? The safest stuff in the world.”
“Sure, it is! That’s why the job is open, why powder monkeys get wages and a half!”
“You had me fooled, Tommy. You never struck me as being a coward.”
“I’m not a coward!” I snapped. “I just don’t like dynamite, and you know why I don’t!”
“I know,” he said softly. “But that’s the way it is, kid. I’m down for powder monkey, and you’re down as my helper. That’s what you do or you don’t do anything.”
I hesitated. I took another small drink. He caught my eye, nodded slowly.
“That’s it, Tommy. Dyna or depart.”
“But, dammit, Four Trey…!”
“So what’s it going to be?”
There was only one thing I could say, and I said it. He grinned approvingly and held out his hand. “That’s my boy. Let’s shake on it.”
We shook. I looked down at my hand and saw that there was a five-dollar bill in it.
“Happy birthday, Tommy,” he said.
“Oh, now, look,” I said, feeling kind of embarrassed. “You didn’t need to do that, Four Trey.”
“Why not? A man doesn’t get to be twenty-one but once in his life.”
“But I’m not even sure that I am twenty-one. I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Well, now you can be sure,” he said. “I say so, so you can depend on it.”
“Anyway, my birthday was last week,” I said. “I forgot all about it until just now.”
He yawned and leaned back in the grass, making a waving motion for me to be on my way. “Go scoff, Tommy. Have some fun if you can find anything to have it with.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot, Four Trey.”
“Just be sure you meet me out at the camp in the morning. Better make it around five o’clock. We’ll have to hire on, and we’ll be working up ahead of the ditchers and draglines. Wherever there’s hard rock.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
He cocked his hat over his eyes and folded his hands on his stomach. Seemingly, he fell asleep at once. And I went on up the creek bed and into town.
Acclaim for Jim Thompson
“The best suspense writer going, bar none.”
—New York Times
“My favorite crime novelist—often imitated but never duplicated.”
—Stephen King
“If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it.…His work casts a dazzling light on the human condition.”
—Washington Post
“Like Clint Eastwood’s pictures it’s the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors.…One of the finest American writers and the most frightening, Thompson is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell.”
—New Republic
“The master of the American groin-kick novel.”
—Vanity Fair
“The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction.”
—Chicago Tribune
Recently released e-books by Jim Thompson
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Cropper’s Cabin
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Now and On Earth
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Recoil
The Criminal
South of Heaven
The Golden Gizmo
Contents
Title Page
Welcome Page
Epigraph
1: Allen Talbert
2: Allen Talbert
3: Martha Talbert
4: Martha Talbert
5: Robert Talbert
6: Donald Skysmith
7: William Willis
8: William Willis
9: Richard Yeoman
10: I. Kossmeyer
11: I. Kossmeyer
12: President Abraham Lincoln Jones
13: Hargreave Clinton
14: Donald Skysmith
About the Author
Preview of South of Heaven
Acclaim for Jim Thompson
Books by Jim Thompson
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright 1953 by Jim Thompson
Copyright © renewed 1981 by Alberta H. Thompson
Excerpt from South of Heaven copyright © 1967 by Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1995 by Alberta Thompson, Sharon Thompson Reed, Patricia Thompson Miller and Michael John Thompson, sole heirs of Jim Thompson
Author photograph by Sharon Thompson Reed
Cover design by Allison J. Warner; cover art: Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-0-316-19592-8